Author, author.

Scott Heim and Dale Peck dish the dirt on publishing, fame, Kansas, and Peck's new book

I first met Dale Peck in late 1991 in a cafe near Columbia University, where we both had enrolled as students seeking a masters of fine arts degree in writing. He and I were the sole Kansans m the program; a mutual friend had connected us. But our coincidences didn't end with Kansas. Dale had grown up in Hutchinson, 15 minutes from the farm where I was raised. We were less than a year apart in age. During high school Dale had been employed by Sirloin Stockade, a Midwest chain where I sometimes dined with my T-bone-loving father; I worked at nearby Oasis, an independent record store Dale had occasionally visited. We liked many of the same films and had a mutual fascination with obscure British pop bands. Soon after our meeting we even would briefly date the same guy, although not at the same time, thankfully.

Back then, Dale bad just sold Martin and John, an exquisitely written novel that interwove the stories of its two central characters. The book was greeted with lavish praise, and any envy I felt was sharpened by our freaky similarities; still, it wasn't difficult to agree with Edmund White's assertion that Martin and John was "the best book of the year." Dale followed in 1996 with The Law of Enclosures, which framed a narrative reprising characters from his debut around an astonishingly candid autobiographical section. And now the third novel, Now It's Time to Say Goodbye--an astute, expansive thriller about two gay men who leave New York for a tiny Kansas town filled with malevolent secrets--is set for release this month. The book, both unruly and wholly absorbing, proves somewhat of a departure for Dale; it manages to comment an the sins and prejudices of a fictional small town while remaining a surprisingly commercial thriller.

Recently I met Dale at another cafe, this time in the East Village instead of the upper west side, both of us six years older than at our original meeting. What follows are excerpts from our rant about his new novel, the wayward state of today's literary some. and the landlocked flatlands where we endured our childhoods.

Many musicians and actors stay popular with the public by continually reinventing themselves. I wondered if you were conscious of that, considering the differences between your previous books and Now It's Time to Say Goodbye.

I don't know if I was trying to "stay popular" as much as "get popular." The number of books I was selling was not enough to a living This time I wanted to create a narrative that was now and fresh and would work in the guise of something more readable.

Bizarre at this way sound, the small-town atmosphere and numerous narrators in your new book reminded of Salem's Lot by Stephen King. Do you have allegiances to popular novels like that?

All I used to read was popular fiction. I loved Sidney Sheldon. The closest thing to literature I read was probably Huckleberry Finn, which I now think is an awful book, actually.

For me, the shifting point of view was a personal choice. I had just written a book that was all one single voice, and it got monotonous and suppressive to me by the end. So when I wrote this it was, "No, I want 50 different people this time--a sashaying queen, a black lesbian, a 95-year-old Southern matriarch." As many characters as I could get away with.

I love that your lead characters interlope from New York, stuck like splinter in a backward Kansas town. You seem highly tuned to the separate speech patterns and cadences of each character as well as the tensions brought about by "outsiders."

I wasn't born in Kansas like you. I moved there when I was 8. It really shocked me: My language was different; people made fun of my New York accent. Fundamental things, like people saying "pop" instead of "soda," "scoot" instead of "move."

Midwesterners don't talk about their feelings; they don't act on their passions except maybe once every 20 years, when they go crazy and cut someone's head off. Kansas strikes me as really tense. It's an atmosphere of perpetual drought above the land, yet all this water below; the tensions of natural disaster; the push-pull between poor farmers and the amazingly rich cities.

People carry such stereotypes about Midwesterns. This book is most intriguing and problematic to me when it either explodes or cements them. Characters like Divine, a black hustler who services men at the truck stop, are present. But so are characters, like the town sheriff, who gel completely with people's ideas about backwater Kansas.

Well, there are definitely hicks in Kansas. Yet these are regional versions of any "dumb person" from anywhere in the world. They are more or less stereotypical people used for comic relief You can take them seriously or not. In a book this big the goal is not to keep all the characters interesting but for them to fulfill their roles within a complex narrative machinery.

How do you feel about the categorization of novels as "gay writing"?

If you're branded a "gay writer" with your first book, there's really no way to get away from it. It influences your readership and sales, and that's frustrating. And while it helped the first book, it hurt the second. I do want to sell more than most gay writers sell, and I'm tired of scrambling to make ends meet by writing when there are thousands of heterosexual writers who make perfectly fine careers off their writing.

Yes, there's a huge difference between publishing a first novel and being the "new young literary hit" and then no longer getting that upsurge of excitement with a second book.

I think both of us wrote difficult and in some ways pretty depressing second novels. That was a risk we took. Both our first books came out at the right moment: People were looking for exciting books--and gay books too, actually. The mainstream press was bending over backward to show they could sell gay books. Our first books did really well, and this silliness among the presses and the critics worked in our favor.

Two years ap at the OutWrite conference another novelist commented that if a young gay male writer was halfway good-looking, his books would naturally sell better. The comment referred to your publicity for Martin and John and also mine for Mysterious Skin. Do you agree? If we were Quasimodo and Cyclops, would our books have sold as well?

Book publishing is certainly the most unsexy field, especially in this age of wallpaper magazines where everything is beautiful and completely plasticized. The idea of being considered good-looking in any kind of marketable way doesn't occur to me anymore. If some person out there thinks his ugliness is not getting him published, I feel sorry for him. But I'm not going to disfigure myself to give someone a level playing field.

In interviews I always wonder whether something I say might come back to haunt me. I've read interviews with you before and gasped. Do you sometimes say things you wish you hadn't? Would you regard yourself as guarded or candid?

Really, really candid. But I have to watch myself, because I hate almost everyone in publishing, where nearly everything is disreputable and disgusting. And I think almost everything that's written is crapola.

When I got backlash about the female character's sexuality in my second novel, it was not from women but from hyperaware gay men who seemed overconcerned with a politically correct agenda. Tell me about the backlash you have gotten from your books.

I certainly got anger about my books not putting forth any "good gay images." But what can I say? I have cut things where characters come off as offensive or silly or stereotypical. However, it's not my intention to please people, either. I want to render complex, complicated human beings on the page.

A professor once told me that after is published, the writer should never go back and read it again.

Wrong! I don't believe that. I reread myself all the time. Sometimes just to convince myself that I know how to write. Don't you get that feeling sometimes, when you sit looking at the blank sheet of paper or computer screen, that you're fooling yourself?

Yes, but at the same time it drives me crazy to reread older material. You know, "If I'd written that paragraph now, I would have changed this word."

But that's also refreshing. I have every intention of pulling all my books at some point and revising all of them. I want to make significant changes to all of them and republish them.

What has been the highlight of your career so far? The biggest disappointment?

Probably the highlight was that "new writer buzz" for Martin and John. One week I was selling underwear on Christopher Street, and suddenly I could pick up the Times and see my picture. But you can never live up to that experience again. You publish your first book only once. If you are lucky, you can be the hot new kid on the block. Everyone writes about you in this sweet and slightly condescending way because you're so achingly young. But they don't do that anymore with a second book.

Probably the greatest disappointment has been finding myself trapped in the position of being young and slightly disaffected. Especially when other writers who are significantly less talented, with less to say and less interesting ways to say it, are rewarded because their work is less sexually troubling to the mainstream.

Do you think challenging, quality literature is dying?

I don't. I think challenge a big mess, and sometimes great books get washed away, and some of the most awful things get published. But it was the same when Woolf and Joyce and Eliot were alive too. I've always had this idea that I would write a dozen books, tops. I'd love to be done with writing by the time I'm 50. To do it and then be alive for 20 or so more years and have people clamoring for just one more book.